Blogging platform Movable Type has 39 plug ins available now that the entire set has been fully translated over from the original Japanese.

Since the acquisition of Movable Type parent company Six Apart by Japanese firm VideoEgg in 2010 formed SAY Media, the majority of development work has moved to Japan, and so it wasn't until the Movable Type Idea Exchange in October that these new tools were translated and released to the English speaking population.

Movable Type 5.2 Social + Analytics Plug Ins

The Movable Type Idea Exchange was just the beginning. More translated plug ins are on the way, according to Nick Osanai, Movable Type Japanese community manager.

We're glad to hear about the Facebook Poster plug in because it posts a Facebook notification when a new entry is published. Additionally, it's good to see a Google Analytics plug in that adds a widget to the dashboard for quick updates on traffic and usage figures.

There are currently over 1,000 plug ins available for Movable Type, and with the latest version 5.2 now readily available, new plug ins will no doubt be forthcoming that take advantage of the new features.

Functional Plug In Highlights

There's tons of functionality in many of the other plug ins like searching published blogs by category (CategorySearch), downloading blogs as ePub files (MTePub) and uploading multiple files at once (MultUploader). But the three we like best besides Facebook and Google Analytics are the Amazon, QuickRebuild and PreviewURL plug ins.

The Amazon plug in publishes content to Amazon S3 or CloudFront, and the files can also be uploaded and stored to be used in building static Web pages. QuickRebuild is a powerful plug in that allows multiple websites to rebuild at the same time.

We also appreciate PreviewURL because it allows for draft previews to be shared with those outside the MT environment. It creates a preview URL (obviously) that can be shared, and that person can then see the draft without logging into the system.

It's a good start for the 5.2 version, and we are looking forward to seeing what else the developers come up with. Tell us in the comments what kinds of functions you are looking for and if you've contacted the team about your idea.